Wot I Think: Payday 2

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After a weekend on the beta, where the game crashed and lost my progress and the following missions were so tough that I couldn’t claw it back, I’ll admit I didn’t like Payday 2. I quit, leaving my friend Owen to carry on with random players. But Owen has a way about him. A childish enthusiasm that he constantly fired at me on IM. He was having fun, and he wanted Bopo & Bucko* to team up again. He’d show me the way, he said. Then Jim said we should WiT it. So I threw the mask on, we formed a crime team with a pair of other friends, and hopped back online. Here’s wot I think.

In short: it’s good, not great. It hasn’t so much improved with age as spread out a bit, gaining a gut and adding some wobble to the co-operative first-person crime spree. I’ve spent about ten hours in-game and there’s still loads to do: skills to unlock, more heists to perfect. I honestly didn’t think I’d take to it, but from the first map to the ridiculous multi-stage mission we closed off on, we had a seven-hour stretch of uninterrupted shooting at one point. The opening pretty much set the tone.

We were outside a jewellery store, on an easy mission plucked from the baffling server browser that I’ll be angry about in a bit. Owen was explaining how the heist would drop: he and Andy would take the back alley, kill the security guards and answer their pagers. I’d be out front with Emily, killing the two cops and taking out any the fleeing pedestrians who might report on us. Then we could grab the loot and escape.

Nothing could go wrong, apart from all the bits that went wrong.

But that’s the point.

It’s very hard to do a stealthy run through in Payday 2, and the best our team managed was about two minutes of hidden activity before we were rumbled. The first part of most missions allows you to walk around the map and take it in: you can tag guards, spot cameras, plan entrances. Then when you decide it’s time, you put on the mask. I pieced together the scramble at the back through Owen’s panicked voice-chat: “Put your mask on! Hit him! Again! Now grab his pager. Coolio. Now we… aw!” *Whumwhumwhum!*

Someone had flubbed, but there was no time to figure out who, so we just blamed Owen. The police were on their way. We all gathered in the main store, smashing display cases, and threatening the customers. The loot we would cram into bags that we’d eventually pass into the getaway van. We piled the bags in a corner, to keep them away from the police who could pick them up, and tied up a few of the customers so we could use them to trade. In this instance, there were no safes to worry about, but there were other run-throughs where we’d have to tend to drills boring into the money bins. Then the cops hit.

The police arrive in timed waves: first the beat cops, then the heavies, then SWAT and snipers. By now, any notion of our group having coherence had scattered like coins from the shaky hands of a scared bank teller. I was sprinting between two back rooms, doing my best to keep the police from sneaking in, and the others were weaving between cases. All we were doing was firing and backing each other up, enjoying the hefty feel of the weapons, panicking over health and ammo, and blaming Owen. We weren’t the well-knit team who could anticipate each other’s every move, but the busy UI did the majority of that work. I could see health and ammo stats, player positions and dropped deployables, at a glance.

We were actually doing well: the body count was high, the pile of loot was undisturbed, and we all had oodles of health and ammo. The car arrived and honked for us. It was time to leave. This is where I made my mistake. Every interaction is timed, so even picking up a bag is bound by a countdown. We all grabbed bags and bolted out the front of the store. It was hectic, and I was in front, crouch-walking towards the van. I tossed out a few suppression blasts and hoped they hit, but even if they didn’t the rest team were doing the same, providing some insurance. That many bullets was bound to do some damage somewhere. I got to the van and looked behind me: the team walked like a group of ducklings, waddling with the weight of the loot. As we all gathered, the van didn’t move. Then I noticed the loot bag that I was supposed to be carrying was floating away on the other side of the fight. It looked like a ghost as it vanished on the back of a policeman. My clumsy fingers had flubbed picking it up, and I hadn’t noticed in the rush to the van. We all watched, now exposed to the wall of police that had surrounded the store, incapable of reacting. Death was mercifully swift.

It wasn’t the only time we had victory yanked from us, nor was it the only time that failure still managed to be fun. Payday 2 has a knack of undoing best (and Bopo) laid plans, but in a way that makes you want to return. You can often spot what went wrong and which element of human error you should eliminate. We set off alarms and alerted the entire FBI in one unstealthy assault on their HQ, and though we recovered, that alarm caused a shutter to close on a server room, doubling the length of time it took to break in. That extra few hundred seconds was what done us in, when someone was downed we all swiftly followed.

People are ‘downed’ in stages: first the person drops to the ground after being injured, but they can carry on shooting. If they take enough damage in that stage, then everything goes grey (for them) and they can’t shoot back. If no-one manages to save them, they’re taken into custody and you’ve lost them until a hostage trade is negotiated by the game. We failed two missions just by trying to rescue one player: they’d fall, the rescuer would drop, the rescuer’s rescuer would fall, and the rescuer’s rescuer’s rescuer would fail. If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail spectacularly, and in a pile of bodies. We restarted because we just had to win.

While it’s one thing to have people replay maps for their own sense of completion, it’s another to do so cheaply. It’s not until you get to level ten that more missions are added to the meagre amount on the map screen, and that can be quite a slog. The longer we played, the more a touch of Groundhog Day started to settle in. I just checked and I’m sadly not Bill Murray: I don’t get to win life by repeating the same thing over and over. While there’s a good variety of missions, from a fun run on a nightclub where I demanded everyone report to the dancefloor, to busting into a meth lab and cooking up your own batch, the same bank from an earlier mission cropped up in a multi-stage, which is a tense series of linked missions that you get a huge score from. Though it wasn’t quite the same bank, because maps will randomise loot placement and objectives, and some routes will be blocked off. It’s a really good system for making each heist just that little bit different each time, and we did have to adapt tactics accordingly, but it feels cheeky when they use it to shove a map I’ve already played into a sequence with a couple of others. Particularly when the game does its utmost to get you to play them over and over on the map-screen, anyway.

Offering you multiple versions of the same mission at different difficulties is just one of the problems I have with the menu screen. Payday 2 ditches a traditional mission selection menu, instead requiring you to select missions from a map. That’d be fine if the missions were placed on logical part of the map, but they’re not. Instead they throb in and fade out, actually disappearing from the screen. Filters don’t help, as they only apply to things like enabling friends list and adjusting for ping. It’s manages to be less useful than Skyrim’s celestial skill-trees, which was my gold standard of terrible until now.

It’s not as if they don’t know how to do it. The character skill-tree selection is fine, even if the choices are a tad busy. You have four classes, each with three branches. My own selection was the Technician, because he had a skill track that led me to the promised land of a sentry gun. But I could have headed towards a faster drill or better C4. And I still can: there’s no stopping me from selecting skills in those tracks as well, or combining entire classes so I can have the power of an Enforcer, alongside the speed of the Ghost, or the crowd-controlling Mastermind. I can even respec.

The equipment screen also works: any weapon can have a number of mods attached, which are earned, bought, or unlocked. The usual spread of handling, sights, suppression, and customisation are there, to improve on the already fun guns. And you can even sell collected upgrades and masks back to the game. Some of the prices are off, sure (a customised mask is thousands of dollars), and it’s a tough call to decide between paying for character upgrades and weapons because you’ll often not have the money for both. To move from an actual working menu to the broken mess of the mission menu is as jarring as being zapped by a taser.

What a fundamental thing to get wrong. It does a lot right, otherwise. Hanging out in the menu screens, advising on possible upgrades, moving from job-to-job, it’s slightly more communal than Left 4 Dead. Everyone joins a map together, and there’s also drop-in joining. If someone falls out completely, the AI will ready up, though the squad AI is pretty basic: they don’t carry items, which could mean multiple trips for the players. The enemy forces aren’t terrible to fight against: the staged waves are more compelling to me than a randomised assault. It’s good to know when it’ll get rougher to help with the planning and the ammo and health deployment.

Most of the levels are fun, the only downright stinker we came across was a mall heist that required the team to smash $50,000 of stuff. There’s only the vaguest feedback given, so we didn’t know what to smash, what would cost more, and why smashing up a showcar seems to have no effect. It’s miserable to in there, wasting bullets and time when the other levels flood you with information. Drill have timers on them for god sakes, this damn level could have a clearer countdown. Even stages that placed drill locks in quick succession were more bearable.

That’s partly because this is a party game. There’s no getting around that it works better with friends or friendly faces, particularly people who can take a failure and laugh it off. I haven’t found too many in the general server population, to be honest. A lot of hosts see anything below level 15 as a personal insult, and they like to abuse the kick button. That’s not too much of a problem if you’re comfortable on a microphone and surrounded by Steam friends, but your mileage will vary depending on who you play it with. Which isn’t unusual for a co-op game. It’s a good shooter, with flashes of brilliance in some of the missions, but I’d only buy it if you have people to play it with.

You do need a group of people from what I hear. As I’ve never played with random people personally.
Although you get the rare case of people joining a game and quickly saying they aren’t going to kick you, so there are sociable chaps out there, but hidden amongst the elitist ones.
Still, grab friends, be confused together, good fun.

I’ve played equal parts with friends and randoms. I’ve had fun in both groups. I’ve got more friend invites in the last 2 days than I probably have in the last 6 months on Steam from PUGing Payday 2 games. So far I’ve run in to a bunch of funny people and maybe one or two assholes.

Oh come on. Noone ever kicked people with low lvls on normal difficulty.
But of course when we hosted an Overkill “Diamond Heist” or “No Mercy” it was a pesonal insult to everybody on board to allow a low-lvl guy into the party so that was the point where we simply turned on the filters and waited for somebody else.
It wasn’t a matter of elitism, it’s just that it was way-WAY easier to complete heists on overkill on higher levels (90+). Can’t say anything about Payday2 though. 505 pulled the 4-Pack from CIS and now we’re waiting for the autumn sale.

I honestly haven’t run into this issue, yet. Most of my pals are awaiting PAYDAY before they can pick up the game. I have made several friends on Crime.net and I’m usually pretty introverted when it comes to games like this. I’m not a fan of the elitists and I am pleasantly surprised I haven’t run into them yet.

The closest thing to asshole that I’ve experienced was during ‘Bank Heist’, someone (obviously new to the game), kept getting downed and placed into custody. We all ended up failing because of this guy, he was carrying some money and dropped the bag right into the middle of a huge group of SWAG — unintentional, I hope, and we tried to revive him. Another player made a comment akin to, “Well, we died. At least we know how to do it better next time, right?”

Yeah, it’s sadly already a factor in the game. It essentially translates to: Stay away from randoms. Or host games yourself.
That said, this game is quite a bit easier than Payday 1, don’t be affraid to tackle the early missions on very hard right from the beginning. Experience and money is tied to difficulty and mission performance. And it seems the gain escalates quite a bit with higher difficulties, for example it took me two to three games to reach Level 10 with two Jewelry Store runs on Overkill Difficulty. It’s still grindy as hell though, which is another problem entirely.

Really? Every game during the beta, the level 30 players were always giving tips and helping out noobs. I have seen zero assholes (but a few rage quits) in my 10 hours or so of playing the beta and release.

I am having an absolute blast with this game. The price tag is right. I did not particularly enjoy PAYDAY: The Heist but this game is vastly improved in every way. I particularly like the way you choose your missions. You have to be alert for the missions you /want/. It prevents farming of the ‘Jewelry Story’ mission, in which you can clear in less than one-minute (easiest difficulty) if your group knows how to smash and grab.

The random item card thing has grown on me quite a bit. At first, I thought it’d be a nuisance but I find myself on the edge of my seat awaiting to be disappointed.

I didn’t think the mission menu was all that bad. It showed me what missions were available, how many players were in them, what the difficultly level was, and if they were in the lobby (most were). A friend can start a game and you can join it via Steam. Thought it was kind of novel how it was presented. The lack of filtering options is pretty damn ridiculous, though.

Also, I got to level 10 (to unlock the other missions) in like… 3 or 4 hours maybe? I repeated a few jobs, mainly just so I could get them perfected. It was a bit of a pain, but you unlock the rest so soon it hardly matters.

In any case, I’ve been having a blast with the game so far, even with only randoms to play with. Take the same approach you would to Dota 2 or something similar: add everyone that you have a good time with to your friends list and then join their games later.

Plus, immersion. I enjoy playing L4D with randoms of varying skill levels because I think having the occasional player who is a noob or fuck up in that game adds to the fun. It’s like in a zombie movie where survivors of varying skill levels don’t know eachother, yet have to work together.

Playing with people you don’t know doesn’t make as much sense in Payday, though.

I’d like to have your’s (or anyone else’s) comments on the style of the game, in art and in tone. Is it as blatantly childish (in the negative sense of the word) as the box-art for the game? I’ve entirely avoided the franchise on account of how unsympathetic an image the promotional material projects.
Are civilian casualties played for laughs? – while I’m not averse to games where you as the player commit gruesome acts for fun, I’m not entirely comfortable with games that projects your psychopathic behavior as something fully and earnestly cool.
So how is the gut-feeling of playing it, besides the obvious technical fun.

It’s a game about heists which have a habit of going wrong. Civilians aren’t played for laughs, you lose money, you get a timer penalty for hostage negotiations, your operator shouts you down and you lose hostages.
Most of the time is spent trying to come up with grandiose plans and then picking up the pieces as the whole city policeforce comes down on you, because someone accidently knocked over a vase (please note, vase may have been a camera tied into a security network).

It is quite simply: A game. It’s not any more or less mature than videogames in general. This is not the game for you.

If it’s anything like Payday 1, you will murder an incredible number of policemen with very little self-preservation instinct. Zombies reskinned in blue.

Personally I wasn’t a huge fan of that; at least many (most?) games where you’re depopulating some kind of civil enforcement bother to paint them as cruel and oppressive (Half-Life 2, Dishonored, Just Cause 2 [ish], Saints Row 3 post-STAG). Here they’re the ones wanting to get (suicidal) civilians out of the shootout.

I wholeheartedly recommend this game if you have some friends and want to have a great co-op experience.

Sure, you can run into assholes, but I have to say, I met new people while playing, added them as Steam friends, and never went back to playing with strangers again.

I put a lot of hours into Payday 1 and I think they did improve on all aspects of the first iteration. I especially like the gunplay: the sounds they make, how they are heard in the distance…it does make you feel that you are right there in that iconic scene from Heat.

And that music, that MUSIC! It never gets old, and I am glad I got the CE with the soundtrack. It adds style to the game.

There are some minor gripes (Hoxton’s voice is different or you cannot just unequip a weapon mod – apparently, you have to sell it, but I might be wrong), but overall, the game is easily worth its price of admission!

It’s pretty terrible as a single player game. It has to be played co-op. Do not even consider buying it if you are planning to play it alone with bots.

Bots basically do nothing other than shoot and revive you. That means you’ll be picking every lock, carrying every bag, resetting every drill. The game makes no allowances for you playing solo, so that’s the same number of bags of loot you need to get to an escape vehicle; balanced around four human, loot carrying players.

To give an example; the Jewellery Heist requires you to walk away with eight bags as a minimum.

I love the game. It’s great with friends, just don’t try and play it alone.

Thanks for that. Some games scale well from single to multiplayer, or the other way, in terms of difficulty, objectives, shared/solo resources etc (Borderlands for example). The fact that this makes no allowances for playing it single player, or even with fewer than 4, means that it is not the game for me. Not until I get some friends anyway. Thanks again.

Even as a two player game it is rough. I have one friend who played payday 1 with me who actually talked me into getting payday 2. Him and I have just been playing “he’s adverse to playing with randoms) and while fun, I’ve noticed how much easier the game could be with four players.

As the article states, many missions start out with you in casing mode, and you have to put your mask on to do anything. Well as soon as you put your mas on, the AI don’t. One level, Jewelry store, is the only mission we’ve managed to stealth on, and only once. Because the AI will only put their masks on once an alarm has gone off, and shit hits the fan. So I’ll be running around the jewelry store keeping people suppressed while he smash and grabs the jewels. The AI? They stand outside doing nothing, which usually means some bystandard walking by looks into the store and sees whats happening and calls the police on us. The one time we got it full stealth I was lucky enough to get the folks outside intimidated.

Even with a third player to watch outside the mission would be 200% easier, but playing with at least a friend is fun, though I must stress, if you play solo, and it is a mission that starts in casing mode, YOU WILL BE DOING EVERYTHING ALONE UNLESS THE SHIT HITS THE FAN!

From all the complaints, I guess I’m the only person that actually likes the mission selection screen. You don’t just get to freely pick your mission and difficulty; you take whatever looks best as they come along. It avoids the syndrome where players just end up picking a single lucrative mission+difficulty combo and playing it over and over again ad nauseum.

Also, I had no problem getting past level 10 in a jiffy, with minimal repetition. The key is really just to play missions harder than “normal”, which offer a substantial XP boost. Also, to get the mastermind ability that gives you (or your whole party) extra XP. A couple of evenings in and I’m already approaching level 30.

The game can be heisty, but it is tricky. I’ve easily pulled off missions where me and a friend have gone in, shouted down the civilians, grabbed all the loot, and were out in a couple minutes, not one shot fired. Part of the game is trying to get good at being all stealthy, and climbing up the trees. There are some skills in the mastermind tree that im using, and the ghost tree that my friend is using, that will make being more heisty, so much easier, and I think adds to the replayability.

I’m rather enjoying the game myself, but its not without it’s faults. The immersion is high but a little disconnected to the overall experience (the Hideout is simply a map you can jump into from the main menu and the server list, while fitting – desperately needs the ability to pick and choose what you want to do as well, I was waiting almost fifteen minutes for a Normal game of Jewellery Heist to pop up and just gave up and went for a Hard one instead).

I really enjoy stealth runs – scouting out the area, making your plan, keeping cover for a friend and the like, it’s pretty grand. However, stealth can be brutal…while fun, a friend and I have noticed some irregularities now and then (stealth calls, an NPC seemingly granting the ability to see through a wall, guards being unresponsive to taunts etc.) – but I’m hoping these will be fixed in time. Unfortunately, when things go wrong – while it can lead to great situations it can also mean grinding slogs as you work your way through a never ending wave of policemen, which can begin to grate when it didn’t feel like your teams fault, but just one of those things.

What I can recommend is not to overthink things, go with the moment, have a plan, execute that plan, mess up and scramble to get the goods. If you do what a friend and I did and started to really look at the game mechanics…the game seems to show its faults, and that’s a shame.

It’s a really good game I think and while better than the original in my opinion, doesn’t quite realise it’s full potential just yet. I can’t help but think of what it’d be like having hostages inside a bank and a fellow player negotiating with a cop shouting at us from outside, while SWAT moves in to set up breach charges behind us…

Still, there’s plenty of content already here and solid gameplay, I feel the developers have done a great job and I’ll certainly get many more hours of enjoyment out of the game!

Also, you really do slaughter a HUGE amount of virtual-lawmen, which could put off some people. Although there is a cheeky reference to that in game via the newspaper that’s worth a giggle.

They may be having a similar problem as to what they had with the first regarding to sensitivity, as apparently there I think vsync or something to do with the framerate sometimes caused the mouse input to be horribly slow on certain machines.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s satisfying to run a heist like clockwork. But it rapidly gets kind of boring too. You know what to do and when to do it. Everyone is in the right spot at the right time. All the i’s get dotted and t’s get crossed. The only challenge is going to higher difficulties, which largely consists of having more numbers (cops, specials and hitpoints) thrown at you.

I like it when things go wrong. Running pugs in Payday makes me think of the film Heat. The great thing about the set pieces in Heat were that things went wrong. The first armored truck robbery, it’s the inclusion of a skeevy outsider, Waingro, who screws things up. Basically setting in motion Robert De Niro’s ultimate demise at the film’s end. Waingro is the film equivalent of a pug.

The other big one is the bank heist. It’s thrilling because it all goes wrong. If they had waltzed it, ran it like clockwork, waltzed out and calmly driven away, it’d be boring. It’s a classic film scene because things go wrong, they get put in a difficult situation, and have to improvise.

That’s how I approached Payday, and why I loved it so much. Playing in a pug is playing with a potential Waingro (or three). Some dipshit(s) who go derping around who don’t carry their weight or who end up needing rescuing. Repeatedly. Can you improvise and still pull off the heist? Can you carry your derpy teammates to freedom and riches? Maybe I’m the derpy teammate that match and we have to overcome my screwups. That’s where the best thrills of the game came from for me: When things go wrong.

It’s why I love games like Teleglitch and FTL so much. Sometimes you just get randomly shafted and have to deal with it. Your best laid plans and carefully stockpiled resources end up evaporating in front of your eyes, as you scramble to deal with the grossly unfair unexpected.

The point? Don’t look down on playing with pugs. Just look at playing with them from a different perspective. Pugging in Payday is playing it like a roguelike.

Pug. You keep using that word – I don’t think it means what you think it means.

(PUG = Pick-Up Game, generally used as a competetive match (as opposed to a normal, public casual game) with a set of random players. You’re probably looking for the word pub. I mean, you can use “pug” if you want to, but that’s also a dog. Your choice.)

I bought several copies of the first Payday and only played for one sitting, which was about two maps. Never touched it again. I was hoping Payday 2 would be fantastic, so before putting my money down for a few copies (expensive, at that for a co-op only game with limited playability), I tried it out a couple days before launch.

My experience was this:

Start game. Three of us immediately decide that one of us will control the entry and club. Another will control the staff in the kitchen and back. Another will work their way to the door to the management office.

But about seven seconds into the game, the fourth guy just started randomly firing before he even made it ten feet and was shooting everything that moved, leading us to be swarmed and ultimately all killed.

Game of the year. Excellent fun, so much more than the original but still needs room for improvement (hopefully free updates/DLCs).

Getting kicked isn’t fun, especially just before the end of a heist *sigh*. If all else fails set up your own server, just remember to edit the server settings if you’re hosting to set a min. rep. level…

Only been kicked out from one game, because they wanted to go full stealth and thats just fine. Alot of people play the game as a basic fps, and thats fine too. Playing both with friends and random,and i gotta say that ive found some really nice randoms that i spent a couple of hours with.

This game for me is far superior to L4D when it comes to co-op, a must buy :0 simply put.

Payday 1 had a game setup item where you could determine the lowest level that could join the group. This one doesn’t? Also, I played the first one solo, extensively, to get to know some maps better. The jewelery heist one was actually MUCH better alone, because there was always some idiot who would intentionally alert the guards. Some maps really did require a coordinated group, but most maps could be run on normal, while solo. I grouped up quite often later on after I got the hang of the game, but if this game REQUIRES you to group on normal, it’s a Pass for me. I like learning on my own and not dragging others into it. Forcing me to drag others along who are also clueless so we can be clueless together is just plain painful for me. And what I hate even more is being lead about by a leash by someone who thinks he’s ‘helping’.

Although I appreciate the online co-op mode, I think the single player mode also deserves “attention” as there are times that I have to wait for a long time for team members and start the heists.

I also don’t understand why there are only 2 AIs this time in single player, where the heck is Dallas? oh wait, maybe that’s my character.

I’ve read from some article that there would be DLCs throughout the year, that’s something to look forward to. For first time gamers, feel free to check a Payday 2 walkthrough if necessary as Payday 2 is not an easy game to play.